"si notre journal est imprimé sur du papier noir, c'est que, dans l'autre monde, c'est le seul en usage."

Though begun as a prank (poisson d'avril) on 1 April 1877, L'AUTRE MONDE is a wonderfully conceived and executed satire down to its smallest details. Written by the "the dead and buried," it purports to be from the year 3753 (based on which calendar is left unsaid); it is printed "along the banks of the Styx"; while subscriptions may be had in the Catacombs. Its front page details a story of murder at the opera (by a "grocer...?") and a soldier's memoir of his own death during the Franco-Prussian War; its final page has a stock exchange report of "dead" and "dying" stocks. The real newspaper LE TEMPS reported that the first issue was "snapped up entirely within five minutes" (3 April 1877). A second issue soon followed, printed in red and dedicated to the topic of witches, this time with advertisements: sulfuric acid toothpaste, a broom that costs "11,000 francs and three children's souls," etc. Even the choice of inks adds to the parody: the fourth issue, about cuckolded husbands, is printed in yellow ink, a color "associated with adultery" (Brossé, BnF). (This issue contains a report on a congress of cuckolded husbands, the "Coucoupolis.") The fifth issue, in orange, pokes fun at Spiritualism. A short article in it on the American magician duo, the Davenport Brothers, feels a bit eerie: one the brothers would die on 1 July, less than a month after this issue was released.

The first five issues appeared in quick succession through April to June of 1877; the elusive sixth issue didn't appear until 1896 but, again, on April 1. The creators of the newspaper are not definitively known, but the 1885 DICTIONNAIRE UNIVERSEL ILLUSTRÉ attributes the first five to the editor and novelist Camille Debans (1832-1919), who had earlier founded a different satirical journal, LE BONHOMME (late 19th-century France loved them). Debans would publish speculative fiction in the 1880s of HISTOIRES DE TOUS LES DIABLES (1882), and another about an international war of the future (LES MALHEURS DE JOHN BULL, 1884). The latter suggests similar themes to the third issue here, in green, which chronicles a massive war between famous figures across time and geography, with Machiavelli and Richelieu on one side and Attila the Hun and Napoleon on the other.

Any issues of this newspaper are rare, and exceptionally so as a complete set; we find only the BnF and Oxford with all six, while the Beinecke and Mediatheque de Montpellier have holdings for the first five. A fantastic ephemeral production, bibliography in dark mode.

Read more: Dictionnaire universel illustré, biographique et bibliographique de la France contemporaine (1885); Brossé, "L'Autre monde, le journal des trépassés," BnF Gallica, 30 October 2018.